(c) 2009-2018, 2026 Jeremy Grayson. A list, but also a love letter to music. A collection of links to the new, the old, the recent and the random. New List first thing (most) Saturday mornings.
The below is a directory of all of the pre-hiatus editions of That Music List (so, Lists 1-236 from 2009 to 2018) which have been repaired since the start of 2026 on the dates given. Broken or no longer extant links have been replaced, and clickable embedded versions of videos have been added wherever possible.
In due course, it is hoped all Lists of this vintage will have received the same upgrade, whereafter continuous routine health checks of them all will take place.
LIST 01 - 15/02/2009 (Links last checked as all working 27/02/2026). Includes James Yuill, Brian Eno, Wire, Sebastien Tellier, Amadou & Mariam, Fake Blood, Circulus, Trembling Blue Stars, Fujiya & Miyagi, Yumi Yumi and more.
Part one of a two-part 1991 special. Includes Cardiacs, Pulp, The Field Mice, Wir, The Popguns, Gary Clail On-U Sound System, Hole, Extreme Noise Terror, Blumfeld, DJPC and more.
Part two of a two-part 1991 special. Includes Poppy Factory, Blueboy, Cubic 22, The Boo Radleys, Slint, They Go Boom!!, LFO, Po!, The Fatima Mansions, The JAMMs and more.
Part two of a two-part 1986 special. Includes Colourbox, Loop, Vindaloo Summer Special, The Shamen, The Wolfhounds, The Go-Betweens, The Close Lobsters, The The and more.
By the time this week's List is published (and well done to me for finally working out how to schedule a publish after just the twenty years' using Blogger) I'll be in Wales.
Not for Wales Goes Pop, alas, though those of you attending are free to make me jealous by telling me afterwards how good it was. Prolapse, Heavenly, Lande Hekt, Pink Opaque, Red Sleeping Beauty, Stuart Moxham, The Cords, Swansea Sound, The School, Would-Be-Goods, Tulpa... I'd settle for that as entertainment any day of the week.
You've got to go back to the 2017 renewal of this festival for the last (only?) appearance there by The Just Joans, but one can assume with relative certainty that the small handful of gigs this January just gone won't amount to the sum total of their live activity this year. Not with their first album since 2020 recently released into the wild.
From a musical perspective, Romantic Visions of Scotland is the most fully realised album in the 20-year career of Glasgow's most acid wits, the DIY recording methods of previous output eschewed in favour of a decamp to Paul Savage's Chem19 studio and the application of more strings than ever before.
I do love the fact that the bill for this upgrade was at least in part met by Creative Scotland, an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish government, making this an example of state-funded misanthropy. I imagine that will have appealed to David and Katie Pope's sense of humour also.
Lead single Oh Veronica, How Right You Are, replete with David Pope reveling in the role of an obnoxious, deluded singer-songwriter in the video, kicks off this week's Session of Sorts feature.
Among the other choices, it's a particular pleasure to be able to include a track from You Might Be Smiling Now. Avowed lovers of fellow sardonic songsmith Stephin Merritt to the extent of covering All The Umbrellas In London and referencing his works in record titles (q.v. 6.9 Love Songs), this 2017 Just Joans long-player took matters further with a sound and delivery which to these ears appeared to pay appreciable homage to the very earliest Magnetic Fields releases. Certainly pre-Get Lost, perhaps even pre-Holiday. It does have a primitive feel to it next to the brand new album, but I love it no less for that.
You'll have to forgive my resisting the temptation to burn one choice on The Just Joans' calling card If You Don't Pull, as the chances are you're already more than familiar with it and there were other things I wanted to share in its stead.
I'm amused even to this day, however, how certain of us used to joke that the Indietracks festival, if not the entire fabric of civilisation as we know it, would cease to exist and crumble into the sea if ever a year passed without someone performing it.
The festival's de facto anthem, then, and our very own equivalent of the ravens of the Tower of London or the apes of Gibraltar.
I first heard David play If You Don't Pull solo in front of a small but wildly appreciative gathering in the merchandise tent late one evening in 2008. Fast forward eight years, and he and two other Just Joanses could be seen hastily rounded up and made to play said song in an absolutely rammed merch tent, thereby staving off Indiepopgeddon for another year. Phew.
Several other appearances at Indietracks would follow; but in addition, in the band's absence, anyone else from Allo, Darlin' to Markie Popstar and Tonieee Clay (the last two named in their Indiepop Singalong capacity) would have a crack at it. Always greeted enthusiastically. Always sung along to lustily. It felt like our song. It always will.
(The Just Joans - Indietracks Festival, 27/07/2014. Pictures are author's own)
One act whose complete absence from the entire lifespan of Indietracks long perplexed me, meanwhile, was Tompot Blenny.
This vehicle for singer-songwriter-bassist Carl Bassett and guitarist Craig Wheatley would have fitted perfectly within the festival's musical idiom, and would likely have been known all about by the festival organisers as a very early signing to Matt Haynes's post-Sarah label Shinkansen.
Perhaps tracking them down, however, had proven deceptively hard. I, along with many in the indiepop scene, and even for a while their own label boss, assumed them to be based in Ilkeston, not even 20 minutes' drive from the Indietracks site at the Midland Railway, Swanwick Junction. They could practically have jogged there.
But subsequent Shinkansen newsletters referred to what Matt's Sarah online archive still refers to as "moves between different locations around the East Midlands with suspicious frequency"; and whatever came to pass in the interim, Carl's Bandcamp page places him a good bit further down the country in Bedford these days.
I would feel desperately sorry for them if an opportunity to play the best festival of them all had gone begging due to contact having not been established. Tompot Blenny would have been a perfect fit for the church stage or better still - as a band whose opening EP included the track Sleepwaiting For Trains, don't forget - an acoustic turn upon Indietracks' USP of the moving train carriage.
Whatever the truth of it, the fine Found Under Blankets - both the title and final track of the band's debut album - is included this week.
An elusive person also informs the final track I want to write about this week.
The song first - an endearingly daft piece of ultra-commercial French hip-hop, Tarzan samples and all, from Benny B, early-1990s staples of that Salut! magazine to which your secondary school will likely have had a subscription. I've no idea how cool they thought they were, but as this came out over the winter of 1990-1991 the inevitable parallels with Vanilla Ice were there to be made.
And then the person. This was one of numerous Francophone tracks to feature in the Eurochart Hot 100, as the name suggests a weekly countdown of the continent's biggest tracks of the week (quantified by sales or airplay or both? I forget which) fronted by Pat Sharp and syndicated by scores of UK commercial radio stations.
It would have been about all I still listened to Manchester commercial channel Key 103 for by then (Radio 1 or Signal meeting all my other music needs), and even then solely for the foreign stuff I'd not hear elsewhere.
Evidently the same applied to one other classmate, who for a few weeks around the time this track came out would great me at school with "ehhhhh, qu'est-ce qu'on fait maintenant?" by way of an in-joke.
If he's forgotten that, he's forgiven - we're going back 35 years here. I've not seen or heard from him in getting on for three decades now, and although he did spend time in Sheffield (by amazing coincidence, at one time living in the next street along from where I now call home), I have no evidence that this remains the case.
So... ou est tu mon ami, Simon? Ca va?
J xx
Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/03/2026).
On to this week's selections shortly. I promise. First of all, however, and for the second week running, it's a pleasure to be able to enthuse about a very, very good gig attended since the last we met.
Heavenly's storming set at Sheffield's redoubtable Sidney & Matilda last weekend will live long in the memory, delivering as it did everything one would hope a Heavenly set in the 2020s possibly would.
A splendidly curated collection of tracks new (eight from Highway to Heavenly) and old (ten from the Sarah and Wiiija days), light and shade (no eschewing of the darker subject matter in the band's catalogue).
Performers older, wiser, kindly and self-effacing, if nobody's fools. Highly amusing, also; though following an adroit bit of on-stage trolling guitarist Peter Momtchiloff might just want to hope his day job with Lex Academic doesn't require him to visit either university in Sheffield any time soon.
A crowd both big and spread across the age range. The enormous numbers of streams which the likes of P.U.N.K. Girl and Me and My Madness have been netting on TikTok and Spotify had played at least some role in driving Heavenly's return to active service. It's not much of a reach to suggest that part of that newly found audience were in attendance here.
Validation, then, and in the most positive senses of the word, vindication also.
And joy. Lots of joy. From the rapturous reception to opener Portland Town through to the delightfully genderblind reading of C Is The Heavenly Option, gig co-organiser and All Ashore!/Plouf! mainstay Elodie Ginsberg occupying the persona of Calvin Johnson for one night and possibly one night only.
Tulpa were in fine form also, and if it's not too wide of the mark to suggest as much, the winning chug of 1980s era Wedding Present that I can detect in certain of their tracks came more to the fore live than on record. They can consider themselves rightly pleased with their evening's work also.
Just up the road the same evening at the Network, in the sort of timetable clash that used to give us Indietracks attendees aches of the head and heart, Gina Birch was by all accounts delivering a barnstorming set in support of The Au Pairs.
I've been looking forward to finding a space for the lithe, addictive title track of Gina's 2023 album ever since this blog was reactivated, and this feels like the perfect moment to do that; something from the 2025 follow-up will also appear in due course. If I'm even remotely as cool as Gina when I eventually hit my seventies, I'll be... well, astonished really.
Staying with things which take place in Sheffield, one of the absolute joys of rediscovering my mojo with all things music has been to invest more time in listening to The Breakdown, Sheffield Live's two-hour Saturday afternoon radio show dedicated to interesting new tracks.
Usually the preserve of regular presenters and all-round good eggs Joel Rigler and Steve Vickers, Joel was instead joined a few weeks back by Ian Turley, the second All Ashore! member to get a mention this week already but invited to the show in his other guise as My Lo-Fi Heart, purveyor of (as his YouTube channel nicely puts it) lo-fi love songs for lo-fi lovers.
Two things in particular struck me in Joel's interview with Ian as regards approaching blog writers with new tracks. This is where you all scream at me that this sharp practice has been going on since Jesus was in short trousers, but Ian noted that plenty of music bloggers out there demand payment from an act before consenting to write about their music.
Seriously? Hand on heart, in seventeen years of maintaining That Music List, on and off, the thought of asking potential contributors for money has never even remotely entered my head. I'm genuinely just thrilled whenever I alight upon something I love sufficiently to want to include. That feels like payment enough for me.
Secondly, Ian meditated briefly on how siloed genre-wise so many blogs still appear to be, citing the personal experience of his tracks having been liked by some bloggers, but not included on their blogs for being too EDM for the indiepop kids and vice versa.
Good grief. There are acts out there who have made the melding of those sorts of styles pretty much their modus operandi. Joel quickly gave the example of Fujiya & Miyagi, veterans of nine albums and a smattering of TML appearances, and that's an excellent shout.
Suffice it to say, Ian, that this is a blog which is not remotely troubled by how great a degree of genre cross-pollination there may or may not be in your material. It all sounded great at Hatch before Xmas, both tracks played on The Breakdown likewise, and it's nothing but a pleasure to be able to include We Can't Fail this week.
If 2025-26 has given the aforementioned Heavenly more than they could ever have dreamed of, broadly similar must also be true of Prolapse, spasmodically active for about a decade (my spreadsheet tells me it was June 2015 when I saw them in Nottingham) before finally aligning their diaries sufficiently to make a proper crack at a comeback in 2024.
As well as genuinely delighting the band, the anointing of On The Quarter Days as Dandelion Radio's number one in the 2025 Festive Fifty just felt right - a reminder to those Johnny-come-lately peddlers of sprechgesang over choppy guitars (hello, Yard Act) that somebody else was doing it earlier, and better.
This week's A Session of Sorts takes in four tracks from the length and breadth of the career of "the most depressing band ever" (their words), starting with the lead from their second ever EP and concluding with another highlight from last year's I Wonder When They're Going to Destroy Your Face.
It's not vocalist Linda Steelyard's face which is currently destroyed, but rather her right foot, following a recent accident on her stairs at home. Nevertheless, pot or not, expect her to be holding her own, and still responding in kind when Mick Derrick gets right in her face, when they play Hebden Bridge, Birmingham and the Wales Goes Pop festival at the start of April.
Meanwhile, My Forgotten 80s... this week lands upon the sad story of Scottish popsters and former Fire Engines alumni Win.
All set for a sizeable hit with their McEwans beer advert-soundtrackingYou've Got the Power, an intervention from then chart compilers Gallup incorrectly attributed their strong local sales to illegal hyping of the track in Scottish record stores.
A further theory I've seen doing the rounds, namely that only so many sales from Scottish bands per week were counted, and that Simple Minds'Don't You Forget About Me hoovered up most of that allocation, might be tempered to an extent by the fact that track was on its way down the charts and ranked no higher than #68 duringYou've Got the Power's two weeks in the very basement of the top 100. Put simply, it alone won't have been preventing a five-figure number of sales for Win from being registered.
A real shame, all things considered. Stripped of all of the association with the advert, and those chart machinations and manipulations, it's still a belting track all these years on and deserved better.
Other highlights this week are not in short supply, but you might be particularly interested in:
A reminder of the joy of early 2000s Japanese one-album wonders Yumi Yumi. Having never attended anything like Primavera Sound, they'd be one of very few bands I can claim to have seen do a set on a beach, courtesy of a short-lived festival on the sands which coincided with my time living and working in Scarborough. Other than Belle and Sebastian's visit to the now sadly demolished Futurist Theatre a few years prior (which did spill out onto the beach for a signing session afterwards), this would be as much indiepop as the town offered me back then - trips to Leeds and London filled in the sizeable gaps. They were certainly the only act I ever saw in Scarborough - or anywhere else - who insisted a teddy bear on stage with them was a bona fide third member of the band, apparently operating the drum machine on their behalf.
A reminder thatThe Montgolfier Brothers were, and always will be, more than the sum total of a David Gilmour endorsement and cover. Like so many before him, from Nick Drake to Tim Smith, how I wish that the upturn in the appreciation of Roger Quigley's work could have been enjoyed during the artist's actual lifetime.
A reminder that, love them as I do, mid-late 1990s female DIY/indiepop/punk bands from the north east didn't start and finish with Kenickie. Not by a long chalk. There have been a number of contemporaneous acts featured on here over the years from the Slampt label in particular, but you also need Scooter Swing/Underwear recording artistes Delicate Vomit in your lives. Here you go.
An unflinching story of alcoholism by The Handsome Family, as featured in Christy Moore's 2006 covers albumBurning Times. Moore's talents for picking just the right songs to reinterpret seldom lets him down, and when I next get round to doing another List comprised solely of cover versions (it's been a while) I'll be astonished if he doesn't get a look-in.
This week's most poignant moment, a tribute to the recently parted Danny Coughlan, and a track which itself was made in memory of Tracyanne Campbell's late Camera Obscura colleague and friend Carey Lander.
J xx
Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 27/03/2026).
After the reams and reams of previous weeks, there's a bit less to say ahead of this week's List.
A good opportunity, therefore, to make mention of the fact that I've been back to the very first List, originally published on February 15th 2009, and given it - for want of a better expression - a complete service. As is only to be expected seventeen years on, plenty of the links needed replacing; but rather than just do that, I embedded all of the videos within the blog post in the same way I've done since the start of this year.
Feel free to click here and take a look. List #1 has never looked better, as far as I'm concerned, and there's not a single choice in that initial selection that I don't still stand by today. Winners all, if some of them don't get played by me these days as often as they still deserve. I've let things slip with Circulus and Alela Diane in particular. Oops.
I expect I'll give some more old Lists a revamp as time and resource permits. But what of this week's assortment, though?
By the time many of you will read this, I'll have been back to Sidney & Matilda to watch the Sheffield leg of the resurgent Heavenly's multinational tour, supported on this occasion by their Skep Wax signees Tulpa.
The band's return was meditated upon sufficiently back in List #240, so it's perhaps enough for now to say I'll be curious to see whether the gig packs the same emotional charge for me as Cardiacs did last week. Both, ultimately, are bands originally chopped off in their prime by tragedy and now making a live and recorded reappearance which seemed unlikely for most of the intervening period.
Either way, from a gig-going perspective this represents the final piece of the Amelia-fronted indiepop act jigsaw for me. I've seen Marine Research, Tender Trap and The Catenary Wires, and I'm totally counting Amelia Fletcher and Eithne Farry's impromptu set in the merchandise tent of the 2009 Indietracks festival as a live sighting of Talulah Gosh. Everybody else there at the time evidently does.
(Talulah Gosh - Indietracks Festival 26/07/2009. Picture is author's own, from as close to the front of the merch tent as I could get, i.e. not very).
Although the same acts were not generally permitted to appear in the main Indietracks line-up two years running, Amelia - who'd been there in 2009 with Tender Trap as well as Talulah Gosh - managed to make an appearance in 2010 as well, performing extensive vocal and placard-waving duties during The Pooh Sticks' comeback gig. The working relationship with chief Stick Huw Williams endures to the present day in the guise of Swansea Sound, of course.
Elsewhere on that year's line-up could be found Veronica Falls, whose magnificently doomy, foreboding take on indiepop hasn't been represented as often on my Lists as it deserves. In common with the Gabrielles Wish track of the other week, Beachy Head is one I'm astonished I've let go without inclusion up until now.
Ditto, if not all the more so, the clanking DIY indietronica of the superb C-C by Tom Vek, a track disqualified from the Favourite Song feature solely on the technicality of me not having heard it for the first time until a year after its 2005 release. If only, if only. It must be my most played track of that year.
As always, everything else in this week's selection is entirely worthy of your attention also. If I can draw your attention to a few of them in particular, they'd be:
The antidote to banal, we're-gonna-win-the-cup football songs, in the form of Cha Cha 2000's bagpipe drones, strangled samples and cardboard box drum machine. A side project of Prolapse's Mick Derrick and Pat Marsden, this is a long way from the last we'll be hearing from these particular gentlemen in the short term.
A selection from Jean Leloup, picked up at the time and enthused over by BBC2's much-loved Snub TV strand. Whether the primary appeal was the notion of Francophone baggy, or rather the relative edginess of Leloup's lyrical comparison of his sex life to Operation Desert Storm, is nothing to which I've found a definitive answer.
As tucked away as one of the b-sides of the singles compilation-plugging new track Glam Rock Cops, a cover of one of Carter's earlier singles by Sultans of Ping (the FC was officially omitted from sleeves at the time, but that didn't necessarily prevent its use). Both bands were slowly declining commercial forces by the time of this track's early 1994 release, but that doesn't make the Sultans' barnstorming run-through any less compelling.
The contribution of Red Monkey (two thirds of whom now comprise two thirds of Knitting Circle, q.v. List #242) to a 2000 split single with Canadian DIY punks Submission Hold, the other half of which really ought to be included on here some day also.
(Red Monkey - Night & Day, Manchester 30/09/1997. Picture is author's own)
A song by New Bad Things which isn't 1993 era Peel favourite (and Festive Fifty entry) I Suck.
An early reminder that BMX Bandits will be performing at the valedictory Pop at the Lock Festival in Middlewich, Cheshire, this coming July. See you there?
A slow, engaging reveal over more than nine minutes from Yo La Tengo, taken from the Electr-O-Pura album which just about remains my favourite of theirs, even three decades on.
J xx
Click on the video or link to play each tune (links last checked as all working 20/03/2026).
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
